This article is also available in Japanese: Read the Japanese version
Ever come across one of those videos of a foreigner amazed by Japan's convenience stores and litter-free streets? One channel known for exactly those videos is Sunny in Japan. All her videos are in English, and as of November 1, 2026, she had 94,800 subscribers.
“Where is she from?” “Is her husband Japanese?” “How old is she?” You may be wondering the same things.
So we went through her video descriptions and captions and her social media profiles. The subscriber and view counts are figures this site measured with the YouTube API. Her words are quoted in the original English from her descriptions and captions. Many of the captions are auto-generated, so the punctuation and capitalization in those quotes are ours, and names appear here only where we could confirm them from her own written spelling.
Who Is Sunny in Japan? She's From Australia
“Travel guides and comfort vlogs from an Aussie girl living in Japan 🇯🇵” is how the channel introduces itself on its About page. She grew up in Melbourne. In a December 2024 video she refers to “Melbourne, Australia, where I grew up,” and says, “I'm from Melbourne, Australia, which is at the bottom of Australia.”
The only name she goes by is Sunny. We have chosen not to go into her real name.
Her X (@itssunnyinjapan) bio reads “Exploring Japan outside Tokyo 🇯🇵” and gives her location as “Osaka-fu, Japan.” Her YouTube description also links to Instagram.
The channel was created on September 30, 2020. The first video she published was a Short in April 2022, and that December she also put out a video of herself setting off for Japan from an airport in Melbourne. At this point, it seems, she was still making the trip to Japan from Australia.
An Exchange Program, Then the Earthquake a Month After She Got Home
Her connection to Japan goes back to high school. At the start of a January 2026 video, she looks back. “This is me, 15 years ago,” she says. “I had just finished a high school exchange program in rural Japan.” One month after she returned to Australia, the Great East Japan Earthquake struck.
She has been studying Japanese for a long time, too. In a July 2024 video she says, “I've been studying Japanese for over 10 years now.” She has also said that her first raw fish in Japan, over 10 years ago, upset her stomach. That may give her a slightly different relationship with Japan than someone who comes as a tourist.
Is Her Husband Japanese? The Road to Osaka
Her husband is Japanese, and in her videos she calls him “K.” In a February 2025 video she says he “was born and raised in Osaka.”
“I quit my job to move to Japan” from December 10, 2023, is where she announced the move. It opens with her work laptop handed back and the words “now I'm officially unemployed.” The description reads, “I'm leaving my 9-5 office job to live in Japan with my husband in his hometown of Osaka.” As for work in Japan: “Do I have a job lined up? Nope!”
As for why, she says, “We were both feeling a little bit stuck in our everyday lives here in Melbourne.” She decided to do it now, before taking on responsibilities she couldn't put off, like a family, a house, and a mortgage.
She applied for a spousal visa, since her husband is Japanese. And before the Certificate of Eligibility she needed for the application had arrived, she had already bought a one-way plane ticket for December 25. That takes some nerve.
Next came “I moved to Japan!” on December 31, 2023, which runs from the days of waiting for the certificate through December 26, the day she gives as her first in Japan. She had received her residence card at the airport the day before, and on this day she set out to register her address. But when she got to the immigration office, she found out that registration is handled at the municipal office.
There she was told she needed the original family registry paper, so she went back home for it. After that she also bought a bike and, at last, was registered as a resident, she says. Many people who move to Japan probably go through much the same thing.
How Old Is She? What She Has Said Herself
What she has said about her age comes from the December 10, 2023, video: “I'm in my late 20s now.” We could not confirm the year she was born.
In the January 2026 video where she talks about the exchange program, she jokingly adds, “Don't do the math.” We won't be working out her age from it, either.
Two Months In: “Things that still shock me about Japan”
The video that got the channel noticed in a big way was probably “Things that still shock me about Japan,” from March 15, 2024. As of November 1, 2026, it had about 845,000 views.
Two months after arriving in Osaka, she snacks on convenience store treats and goes through what has surprised her. The first thing is “just the convenience of everything.”
Gum packets come with little pieces of paper for when you want to throw the gum away. You can get through a ticket gate just by holding up your phone. Supermarket mandarins come with a sweetness scale. She's also struck that to reheat the bath, “you can literally press a button in the kitchen.”
Number two is “the cleanliness of everything.” You can walk down the street and there's “no rubbish,” she says, and yet there are “no rubbish bins anywhere.” She wonders whether it comes from “a culture of cleaning up after yourselves and cleaning school property.”
She also gets into the small details, like the designs on Osaka's manhole covers: Osaka Castle in the center of the city and, farther north, the Tower of the Sun at Expo'70 Commemorative Park.
Also on her list: how drivers get past each other on narrow streets, how good people are at riding bikes, and how quiet the residential streets are. She had thought she was a pretty average bike rider, she says, but after coming to Japan she realized, “I don't know how to [ride a] bike at all.”
There's more: a traffic light called “blue” when it is “in fact green” (in Japanese, the “go” light is called ao, or blue), how “freaking hot” it is on the trains in winter, and the culture of lining up. When she brought up the light with her husband, K, his reply was, “Yeah, good point.”
Umeboshi (pickled plums), on the other hand, got “a two out of 10.” She says she does try to eat them as often as she can, because they're good for you. What's ordinary to people in Japan can look strange from the outside, it seems.
On to Travel Guides: Her Osaka and Kyoto Videos Took Off
After the move, her videos came to center on travel guides. True to her X bio, many are set outside Tokyo, in places such as Osaka, Kyoto, and Nara.
“4 DAY OSAKA ITINERARY,” from February 2025, is a guide to spending four days in Osaka. As of November 1, 2026, it had about 760,000 views. At the start of the video, she describes Osaka as “this city that I now call home.”
Also as of November 1, 2026, “TOP 10 OSAKA PLACES TO VISIT,” from September 2024, had about 590,000 views, and her three-day Kyoto guide from December 2024 had about 530,000.
Her travels have also reached the Goto Islands, Hokkaido, and Hiroshima. On October 29, 2026, she posted a 46-minute video covering Hiroshima and Miyajima. As of November 1, 2026, the channel had 101 videos in all and about 9.37 million total views.
Her Most-Watched Video: The Mistakes Tourists Make
The channel's most-watched video is “15 Japan Travel Mistakes Tourists Always Make,” from April 24, 2026. As of November 1, 2026, it had about 1.019 million views.
She opens by saying she has been living in Japan for a few years now and feels “there's a bit of a gap between what people expect Japan to be and what it actually is.”
The 15 mistakes are sorted into three categories: planning, travel, and etiquette. The first is cramming too much into a summer that is far too hot. Others include not having enough cash, not carrying a small bag for trash, and eating on the train.
The 15th and last is filming on the train. Pointing to a mistake of her own, she urges viewers to “film the experience, not the people.” She says it “just feels like the climate is changing” on the trains, as tourism increases and more people post their trips on social media. That may be something only a person living in Japan can say.
Fifteen Years After the Disaster: Walking the Iwate Coast
The exchange program story comes from a 40-minute video published on January 30, 2026, in which she spends three days visiting the Michinoku Coastal Trail in Iwate Prefecture.
Her guide is Quinlan, who has lived in Iwate for more than 15 years. According to the description, the video was made with the support of a tour company.
She says she went “expecting a fun physical adventure.” What it actually became was a trip spent hearing local residents talk about the day of the disaster.
At the end of the video she admits, “I cried a few times while rewatching that footage,” and calls it “one of the most impactful experiences of my life.”
So 15 years on, she walked in person through the places hit by the disaster that struck one month after she came home from her exchange program. It was probably a special trip for her, too.
Another English-language creator living in Japan is Abroad in Japan's Chris Broad, who started out as an English teacher in Yamagata. It might be fun to compare how each of them first came to Japan.
